Richard E Grant: Glittering highs and stygian lows but a great sense of fun.

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His career has undulated between glittering highs and stygian lows but with Richard making his writing and directing debut next year with the release of the autobiographical film Wah-Wah and his current tour with Simon Gray’s acclaimed Otherwise Engaged, soon to come to Woking, he is definitely on a high. “It’s very satisfying to play,” he said. “I play a middle-aged guy who has apparently got everything in his life and he plans to spend a quiet evening in on his own listening to a new recording of an opera. Instead the world and his wife turn up and his life is put on its head. “The play is kind of like what John Lennon said just before he was shot. He said ‘life is what happens in between your plans’ and that’s exactly what happens. “We’ve been sold out. We have had good reviews and certainly for me it’s the ideal situation. To feel like you are in a hit is a real bonus.” Wah-Wah is released in April featuring Gabriel Byrne, Miranda Richardson and Julie Walters, which has been five years in the making. “The thing I feel the greatest sense of achievement for is Wah-Wah,” said Richard. “It was all shot in Swaziland and it is a real last gasp of imperialism story. I am really proud of it. It’s entirely autobiographical — everything in it happened.” In 2002 Richard became the face of a new advertising campaign for high street retailer Argos — not quite the bright lights of Hollywood but Richard is not worried. “Work is work,” he said. “I was offered it when I was trying to get my film off the ground. It enabled me to do my film and spend the time on it which I wouldn’t have if I had taken other jobs. “It was fantastic. I really enjoyed doing it. The character is such a loon. It was good fun.” Richard’s attitude towards his career is pervaded by this sense of fun and it is with that he went into his 1997 performance as the Spice Girls manager in Spice World. “Ralph Fiennes wouldn’t have done it but I did,” he said. “It was a completely daft movie and we knew it was. “My daughter was eight when the Spice Girls had just exploded. She said to me ‘if you don’t do any other movies again you have to do this film’ so she could meet them. “I had the best playground kudos after I did that film. “I had a blast doing it. They were so unpretentious as people that you couldn’t help but like them.” However Richard balked at the question of who was his favourite of the five, saying if he gave an answer he would have to “remove a platform boot” from his behind. After moving to London from Cape Town in 1982, Richard spent four years looking for acting work in the capital and eventually found it playing a bitter, pill-popping out-of-work actor in the cult hit Withnail and I. He said his early years in London made it easy to relate to the role although he had never gone so far as to cover himself in deep heat to keep warm, as Withnail does in the film. He said: “I can relate to lots of things in it although not the drinking because I am allergic to alcohol. It’s the feeling of yourself against the world and being totally anonymous. Your self-esteem is so battered down, you feel desperate. You feel like the world is against you. “Withnail and I gave me my film career and I am indebted to it 100 per cent.” Despite numerous celluloid triumphs including the brilliant How To Get Ahead In Advertising, Richard’s Hollywood career did not live up to it early promise and was littered with flops. Richard said: “I was in an absolute bomb of a film called Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis. You don’t go into something thinking this is going to be bad. It just went belly up. It’s impossible to know. If you knew you would make a hit movie every time.” He said he made the decision that Hollywood was not for him and not the other way round in the nineties after a string of his films was panned by critics. He said: “Hollywood films are about celebrities running away from explosions and I don’t fit that bill. It was never something I tried to do or wanted to do. “You look at the number of English actors who live there and succeed in making careers there full time — they are few and far between. You end up playing villains or psychopathic screwballs. “I don’t sit around singing the blues about what I have done or haven’t done.” Otherwise Engaged is at the New Victoria Theatre from October 17 to 22.